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“On Writing” is a series of guest posts written by writers for the Ottawa Poetry Newsletter, curated by Rob McLennan. On Writing #107 features former NewPager and poet Gina Myers. Entitled “Is there room in the room that you room in?,” borrowed from the opening sonnet in Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets, Myers explores the concepts of community and inclusivity as place in poetry. Read the full post here.

The annual print issue of Baltimore Review allows readers to catch up on a full year of reading in one volume. The 2016 print issue includes poems, stories, and creative nonfiction from the Summer 2015, Fall 2015, Winter 2016, and Spring 2016 online issues, as well as contest winners for the Summer 2015 and Winter 2016 issues.

In addition to work by 17 poets that opens the issue, Rattle #53 features a Tribute to Adjuncts. The editors write, “Over 65% of U.S. college faculty now work as adjuncts, facing low wages, limited hours, and high instability. We wanted to highlight their writing, while also showing support for recent efforts at gaining better treatment by the university system. As always, the goal was to show the wide range of creative work that the featured group is producing, so while many poems address their careers, others cover a variety of subjects. All of them share their thoughts on adjuncting in the contributor notes section.”

Every one of us who teaches in higher ed should buy copies of this issue to give to our dean, provost, vice president, president. board of trustees – whomever is responsible for the decision-making that retains, and continues to increase, these miserable working conditions for adjunct faculty. Perhaps better still, assign this issue in your classes, have students read it; the real change will need to come from dissatisfied “customers.” If they are outraged about egregious labor practices and refuse to buy their products from certain companies, they should be as equally outraged about the education for which they are paying a premium price to support an oppressed working majority. [Rattle cover artist Allison Merriweather]

TriQuarterly, taking full advantage of its online format, several years ago began featuring video essays in each issue. The editors commented that it was “an emerging form Marilyn Freeman described as ‘the mixed-breed love child of poetry, creative nonfiction, art house indies, documentary, and experimental media art.’ At its core the video essay is, like its print counterpart, an attempt to figure something out.” The most recent issue of TriQuarterly features video essays by Ander Monson, Blair Braverman, and Heather Hall.

The newest issue of New Orleans Review is a special tribute to Shakespeare. According to Guest Editor Hillary Eklund, “The primary motivation for this issue is that 2016 marks the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death, and we wanted to commemorate that by looking at Shakespeare’s 21st century literary afterlives.”

The original call for submissions was: “Four centuries after William Shakespeare’s death, his name ennobles a variety of cultural institutions, from libraries and endowed chairs to summer camps and rubber duckies. Even as these structures—both lofty and lowly—rise and fall, we bear witness to the greatest power Shakespeare described: that of poetry itself to preserve without rigidity, to endure without sameness, and to inspire without dominance. Beyond the array of institutions that bear his name, what conversations do Shakespeare’s eternal lines animate now?”

“We welcomed submissions that riff on, respond to, reimagine, or recast any of Shakespeare’s works in any genre,” says Eklund, “including short fiction, poetry, image/text collections, creative nonfiction, and scholarship. The response was great. We had submissions from poets, fiction writers, essayists, and scholars. We especially relished the opportunity to put creative work in direct conversation with scholarly work; few journals have the license to do that, and the result is, I think, quite exciting.”

Eklund herself is a scholar of early modern literature and Associate Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans. She has published articles and chapters in Shakespeare Studies and in essay collections on early modern literature. Her book Literature and Moral Economy in the Early Atlantic: Elegant Sufficiencies came out in 2015 with Ashgate Press, and she has a collection of essays, Groundwork: English Renaissance Literature and Soil Science, forthcoming from Duquesne University Press.

When I asked about the experience of editing this issue, Eklund responded: “The experience has helped me to focus the chatter around Shakespeare, who this year more than ever seems to be everywhere, and I hope it will have a similar effect on our readers. As we take stock of the many commemorations and celebrations of Shakespeare in 2016, the pieces in this issue help us think through the question of what we gain from Shakespeare today – what, if anything, reading or thinking about Shakespeare is good for. Some of our contributors have taken up Shakespeare’s enduring themes and respun them in modern contexts. Others have used contemporary contexts to rethink some of the problems Shakespeare’s work presents, particularly problems of gender and race.”

In his Welcome Readers Summer 2016 column, Editor M. Scott Douglass begins, “It may have gone unnoticed since we didn’t make a fuss about it, but The Main Street Rag recently experienced a milestone.” Having started in May of 1996, that milestone is 20 continuous years of publishing MSR, beginning as Main Street Rag Poetry Journal. “We’ve gone through many changes,” Douglass writes, “taken advice from notable people like Dana Gioia who advised me to diversify our content and broaden our audience. We did and it did. So did the workload.”

Douglass comments on the efforts of many committed individuals who have supported the publication through the years – with blood, sweat and tears, and “who work specific projects for cheap, sometimes for beer and/or Chinese food.” Sounds like literary publishing as we know it. But Douglass has built quite a publishing house, producing “as many as 200 titles in a single year, but now averages between 100 and 120 titles per year, when you include our titles, this literary magazine and those we produce for others, and the books we produce as a contractor.”

I’m sure there are hundreds of individuals, if not in the thousands by now, who owe some thanks to The Main Street Rag for having given them the opportunity to be published and read, and certainly in those thousands, those who have appreciated being able to read from this publishing house over the past 20 year. MSR has been a mainstay in the literary community. We congratulate them on two great decades of dedication and commitment to literary publishing, and wish them many, many more years of good work.

The Summer 2016 issue of The Georgia Review includes a special feature on Coleman Barks. In addition to an introduction by Editor Stephen Corey, the section includes several poems and a prose piece by Barks. The prose, an essay titled “Figures from My Boyhood,” begins, “Steve Corey asked me to do a prose piece (on my influences, he suggested) for The Georgia Review. But I seem to have more energy for childhood obsessions. Sorry to be so self-absorbed.” Exactly what we would expect from Barks.

Other authors whose works in tribute to Barks are included: Ty Sassaman, Hugh Ruppersburg, Jody Kennedy, Ravi Shankar, John Yow, Norman Minnick, Gulnaz Saiyed, Naomi Shihab Nye, Lisa Starr, and Gordon Johnston. Several of the works, including one of Barks poems, can be read online here.

The newest issue of New Letters (v82 nos 3 & 4) includes a special section of Cuban & Cuban-American Writers & Artists co-edited with Mia Leonin, author of Braid (Anhinga Press) and Unraveling the Bed (Anhinga Press), and a memoir Havana and Other Missing Fathers (University of Arizona Press). Leonin currently teaches creative writing at University of Miami. The introductory note by Editor Robert Stewart reads:

“Humans don’t wait for revolution or democracy in order to live their lives,” says Mia Leonin…Her point underscores both the force of literature and art, and the hope found there. The impulses to generalize about certain groups, to categorize and perhaps condemn–to indulge in the quality of discourse imposed on us by many critics and politicians–find their antidote in literature. “The poems, stories, and essays in these pages,” Leonin continues, “remind us that Cuba is not an idea or ideology, a photo op or a news line. Likewise, its diaspora is neither offshoot nor derivative. Whatever its temporality, literature is the present moment unfolding, and these writers carve out each moment with authenticity and vision.”

Authors and artists whose works are featured: Chantel Acevedo, Alfredo Zaldivar, Ruth Behar, Lisiette Alonso, Cristina Garcia (“Berliners Who, two stories” can be read here), Orlando Ricardo Menes, Ana Menendez, Laura Ruiz Montes, Pablo Medina.